BOOK NEWS: Tracing the figure of the Asian girl in midcentury and postwar American fiction

Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire

By Sharon N. Tran

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

ISBN 978-1-5179-1986-3 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517919863/asian-girlhood-in-the-shadows-of-us-empire/

Representations of the “Asian girl” as lucky objects of humanitarian rescue and rehabilitation have been used to advance America’s imperial ambitions from World War II to the wars in Korea and Viet Nam. In this compelling work, Sharon N. Tran traces the production and instrumentalization of this figure through an examination of state documents, military newspapers, documentary photographs, and other archival materials. Theorizing “Asian girlhood” as a technology of imperial power, Tran exposes how the Asian girl is invoked as a shield that protects the innocence of US empire while she is excluded from innocence herself—relegated instead to a precarious position between child and adult, human and nonhuman, plaything and laborer.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Offering fresh insight into how imperial power operates, Tran analyzes figures such as the Japanese American school-girl in the context of World War II incarceration, the elusive “camptown girl,” and the objectified image of the “Napalm Girl.” Her innovative feminist approach interrogates the tendency to reclaim innocence for the Asian girl or to reframe her as an empowered woman. She engages the work of writers and artists such as Kiku Hughes, Nora Okja Keller, Aimee Phan, and lê thi diem thúy to demonstrate how Asian American literature offers rich theoretical interventions for critiquing the child–adult dichotomy that underpins key structures of imperial domination, illuminating more capacious conceptions of girlhood.

Restoring the dignity and agency of a figure too often denied both, Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire is a groundbreaking intersectional contribution to studies of gender, race, childhood, and state power.

"Ambitious, thoroughly researched, and illuminating, Sharon N. Tran’s brilliant intervention adopts a novel feminist approach to the problematics of race and empire that lie at the heart of Asian American studies. Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire sits in the discomfiting location of the subject who’s silenced, tapping both its potential for critique as well as its capacity for imagining Asian Americanness otherwise."—Daniel Y. Kim, author of The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War

"In Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire, Sharon N. Tran perceptively demonstrates the significant appearance of the Asian girl throughout the archives of US military and imperial enterprise. By examining this figure in twentieth-century and contemporary Asian American literature and culture, Tran offers a persuasive and moving response to this history, theorizing how Asian girlhood obliges us to reckon with the past anew."—Crystal Parikh, author of Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color

Sharon N. Tran is assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

NEW ISSUE: JML 49.2, “Bodies, Subjectivities, and States of Queer Abundance”

JML 49.2 (Winter 2026), edited by Ramón E. Soto-Crespo, on the theme “Bodies, Subjectivities, and States of Queer Abundance” is now live on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/56630.

Content includes:

Nir Evron

Intimate Strangers: Regionalism and the Construction of Nonhuman Subjectivities in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Animal Fiction

FREE

Claire Marie Class

X-Rays, Probes, Fingers, and Noses: Empiricism in Rudolph Fisher’s Detective Fiction 

Ian Tan

Narrative Equilibrium and Biopolitical Aesthetic Image in Philip Roth’s Nemesis: Health as Hermeneutical Exchange 

Meindert Peters

No Creature of Habit? Gregor’s Dancing Dis/Abilities in Arthur Pita’s Adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis 

Megan Girdwood

“As if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only”: Virginia Woolf, the Ballets Russes, and Le Spectre de la Rose (1911) 

Jena DiMaggio

Abortion Epistemology: Ambivalence in the Abortion Plot in Modern Literature 

Julyan Oldham

“Preserved Through Childbirth”: Reading Deep in Mrs. Dalloway’s Virginity 

Chris Coffman

H.D.’s Nonbinary Poetics

Daniel Swain

Frank O'Hara Has Collapsed! 

Julia C. Obert

Queering Irish Joy: Seán Hewitt’s Rapture’s Road 

Reviews 

Grant Matthew Jenkins

“This Is Your Brain on Poetry” 

Aaron Stone

How to Do the History of Queer American Literature

BOOK NEWS: Expanding the metamodernist lens via feminist narrative theories

Contemporary Feminist Fiction and a Case for Expanding Rhetorical Narratology 

By Katherine J. Weese

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1599-9

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215999.html

In Contemporary Feminist Fiction and a Case for Expanding Rhetorical Narratology, Katherine J. Weese explores intersections among rhetorical, unnatural, and feminist narrative theories and post-postmodern theory to argue that an expanded rhetorical poetics offers the most comprehensive model for illuminating recent works that employ unnatural devices for feminist purposes. This pluralist narratological framework is a vital counterpoint to theorists’ tendency to read twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels through a post-postmodernist or metamodernist lens that overlooks unnatural, feminist, and rhetorical narrative theories.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Examining Ali Smith’s The Accidental and Hotel World, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins and Life after Life, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Weese demonstrates how various narratological theories inform rather than compete with one another. Through an expanded rhetorical poetics, including a refined version of James Phelan’s MTS (mimetic, thematic, synthetic) model, she reframes post-postmodern theorists’ concerns with communicative function through a narratological lens to make the case that exploring the rhetorical function of unnatural devices challenges and extends the claims of narrow metamodern readings.

“With enormous skill, Weese shows how an antimimetic narrative can address issues of power and injustice in the real world. She succeeds at a bold and original integration of feminist, rhetorical, and unnatural theories, mapping how they—explicitly or implicitly—interrelate.” —Ellen Peel, author of Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction

“Weese provides a salutary intervention into current debates over the nature and history of ‘post-postmodern’ fiction and a timely contribution to narrative theory as she synthesizes several key strands of rhetorical, unnatural, and feminist approaches. An essential book for students and scholars of narrative.” —Brian Richardson, author of A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century

Katherine J. Weese is venable professor of English at Hampden-Sydney College. Her research has appeared in Storyworlds, Journal of Narrative Theory, Modern Fiction Studies, Narrative, and Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

BOOK NEWS: Engaging critically with Sandra Cisneros's oeuvre

¡Ay Tú!: Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Sandra Cisneros

Edited by Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano

U of Texas P, 2024

ISBN: 9781477329900

https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477329900/

Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), author of the acclaimed novel The House on Mango Street and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, was the first Chicana to be published by a major publishing house. ¡Ay Tú! is the first book to engage critically with her life and work as a whole. Edited by scholars Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano, this volume addresses themes that pervade Cisneros’s oeuvre, like romantic and erotic love, female friendship, sexual abuse and harassment, the exoticization of the racial and ethnic “other,” and the role of visual arts in the lives of everyday people. Essays draw extensively on the newly opened Cisneros Papers, housed in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, and the volume concludes with a new long-form interview with Cisneros by the award-winning journalist Macarena Hernández.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

As these essays reveal, Cisneros’s success in the literary field was integrally connected to the emergent Chicana feminist movement and the rapidly expanding Chicanx literary field of the late twentieth century. This collection shows that Cisneros didn’t achieve her groundbreaking successes in isolation and situates her as a vital Chicana feminist writer and artist.

"¡Ay Tú! brings together a stellar ensemble of Latina/x and Chicana/x literary scholars and essays devoted to the writing of Sandra Cisneros, one of the most prolific writers of our time. This tremendous collection is a gift to every professor and student of literature and cultural studies." ~Deborah R. Vargas, Yale University, author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda

"¡Brava! The coeditors of ¡Ay Tú! have gathered a wealth of scholarly perspectives that students, scholars, and general readers are sure to find illuminating. Insightful and thought-provoking, every chapter opens a door into Cisneros’s familiar and well-loved literary works. Whether you are new to Cisneros or have read and reread favorites, you are sure to find new insights and approaches to her work in this magnificent collection." ~Norma E. Cantú, Trinity University, coeditor of ¡Somos Tejanas! Chicana Identity and Culture in Texas

Sonia Saldívar-Hull is a professor emerita of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of Feminism on the Border: Chicana Literature and Politics.

Geneva M. Gano is a professor of English at Texas State University and the author of The Little Art Colony and US Modernism.

BOOK NEWS: Tracing feminism's progress in literature and television

Feminism's Progress: Gender Politics in British and American Literature and Television since 1830

By Carol Colatrella

SUNY P, 2024

ISBN: 9781438493947

https://sunypress.edu/Books/F/Feminism-s-Progress

Explores how popular novels, short stories, and television shows from the United States and Britain illustrate the positive effects of feminism and promote gender equity.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Feminism's Progress builds on more than fifty years of feminist criticism to analyze narrative representations of feminist ideas about women's social roles, gender inequities, and needed reforms. Carol Colatrella argues that popular novels, short stories, and television shows produced in the United States and Britain — from Little Dorrit and Iola Leroy to Call the Midwife and The Closer — foster acceptance of feminism by optimistically illustrating its prospects and promises. Scholars, students, and general readers will appreciate the book's sweeping introduction to a host of concerns in feminist theory while applying a gender lens to a wide range of literature and media from the past two centuries. In exploring how individuals and communities might reduce bias and discrimination and ensure gender equity, these fictions serve as both a measure and a means of feminism's progress.

"This book is a remarkably comprehensive survey of feminocentric novels and television series that offer personal and systemic responses to the continuing oppression of women. Colatrella pulls together dozens of disparate texts to argue that many popular works from the nineteenth century to the present have been promoting feminist principles in ways that must certainly have affected public attitudes toward and understanding of gender discrimination. Feminism's Progress offers a hopeful outlook on the potential for literature and media to bring about positive change in real-world gender politics." — Robyn R. Warhol, coeditor of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions

Carol Colatrella is professor of literature and codirector of the Center for Women, Science, and Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the coeditor (with Joseph Alkana) of Cohesion and Dissent in America, also published by SUNY Press.

BOOK NEWS: A Black feminist spiritual history

We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism

BY MARINA MAGLOIRE

U of North Carolina P, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-4696-7489-6

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469674896/we-pursue-our-magic/

Drawing on the collected archives of distinguished twentieth-century Black woman writers such as Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, Marina Magloire traces a new history of Black feminist thought in relation to Afro-diasporic religion. Beginning in the 1930s with the pathbreaking ethnographic work of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and ending with the present-day popularity of Afro-diasporic spiritual practices among Black women, she offers an alternative genealogy of Black feminism, characterized by its desire to reconnect with ancestrally centered religions like Vodou.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Magloire reveals the tension, discomfort, and doubt at the heart of each woman’s efforts to connect with ancestral spiritual practices. These revered writers are often regarded as unchanging monuments to Black womanhood, but Magloire argues that their feminism is rooted less in self-empowerment than in a fluid pursuit of community despite the inevitable conflicts wrought by racial capitalism. The subjects of this book all model a nuanced Black feminist praxis grounded in the difficult work of community building between Black women across barriers of class, culture, and time.

"Magloire's examination is wholly unique to the field and makes a significant treatment that is even more necessary now as the study of Black women's spiritual practices has again come into vogue. A wonderfully complex and well-researched book."—Kinitra Brooks, Michigan State University

"An engaging and thoroughly researched book that brings together well- and lesser-known figures to explore religion, spirituality, and feminism among African American women writers, artists, and scholars. For scholars interested in gender, religion, diaspora relations, and comparative diaspora studies, We Pursue Our Magic is essential."—Tiffany Patterson, Vanderbilt University

Marina Magloire is assistant professor of English at Emory University.

Book News: Sisters writing post-independence Jamaica

Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard: Folklore and Culture in Jamaica

BY VIOLET HARRINGTON BRYAN

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN: 9781496836212

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/E/Erna-Brodber-and-Velma-Pollard

Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard, two sister-writers born and raised in Jamaica, re-create imagined and lived homelands in their literature by commemorating the history, culture, and religion of the Caribbean. Velma Pollard was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica. By the time she was three, her parents had moved to Woodside, St. Mary, in northeast Jamaica, where her sister, Erna, was born. Even though they both travel widely and often, the sisters both still live in Jamaica.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The sisters write about their homeland as a series of memories and stories in their many works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They center on their home village of Woodside in St. Mary Parish, Jamaica, occasionally moving the settings of their fiction and poetry to other regions of Jamaica and various Caribbean islands, as well as other parts of the diaspora in the United States, Canada, and England. The role of women in the patriarchal society of Jamaica and much of the Caribbean is also a subject of the sisters’ writing. Growing up in what Brodber calls the kumbla, the protective but restrictive environment of many women in the Anglo-Caribbean, is an important theme in their fiction. In her fiction, Pollard discusses the gender gaps in employment and the demands of marriage and the special contributions of women to family and community.

Many scholars have also explored the significance of spirit in Brodber’s work, including the topics of “spirit theft,” “spirit possession,” and spirits existing through time, from Africa to the present. Brodber’s narratives also show communication between the living and the dead, from Jane and Louisa (1980) to Nothing’s Mat (2014). Yet, few scholars have examined Brodber’s work on par with her sister’s writing. Drawing upon interviews with the authors, this is the first book to give Brodber and Pollard their due and study the sisters’ important contributions.

"Placing the lesser-known Velma Pollard in conversation with Erna Brodber, Violet Harrington Bryan illustrates how local and presumably provincial environments (such as Woodside, Jamaica) are the sites of rich creativity and postcolonial politics. The first comparison of Brodber and Pollard, this book is a key contribution to scholarship on post-independence Jamaican literature. " -- Imani D. Owens, assistant professor of English, Rutgers University–New Brunswick

Violet Harrington Bryan is professor emerita of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. She is author of The Myth of New Orleans in Literature: Dialogues of Race and Gender, and her work has appeared in such journals as American Scholar, College Language Association Journal, and Louisiana Literature.

Book News: Literary studies' engagement with #MeToo

#MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture

EDITED BY MARY K. HOLLAND AND HEATHER HEWETT

Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

ISBN: 9781501372735

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/metoo-and-literary-studies-9781501372735/

Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of sexual violence by confronting it through the study of literature.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

#MeToo and Literary Studies gathers essays on literature from Ovid to Carmen Maria Machado, by academics working across the United States and around the world, who offer clear ways of using our reading, teaching, and critical practices to address rape culture and sexual violence. It also examines the promise and limitations of the #MeToo movement itself, speaking to the productive use of social media as well as to the voices that the movement has so far muted. In uniting diverse voices to enable the #MeToo movement to reshape literary studies, this book is also committed to the idea that the way we read and write about literature can make real change in the world.

This collection of timely, wide-ranging, and diverse essays demonstrates the power of #MeToo to reframe prior debates and silences in literary studies. The editors make a compelling case for #MeToo storytelling as part of a long history of representing sexual violence in literature. The essays interweave literary studies, social activism, and pedagogy in generative new readings. #MeToo and Literary Studies is essential reading and invaluable equipment for scholars, teachers, and students engaging with rape culture, misogyny, and literature. 

--Leigh Gilmore, author of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives

Mary K. Holland is professor of English at The State University of New York at New Paltz. She is the author of The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Succeeding Postmodernism (Bloomsbury, 2013) and co-editor, with Stephen J. Burn, of Approaches to Teaching David Foster Wallace (2019).

Heather Hewett is associate professor and chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an affiliate of the English Department at The State University of New York, New Paltz. Her work on feminism, gender, and contemporary literature has been published in scholarly journals and edited collections as well as mainstream and literary publications.

Book News: Reconsidering realism in contemporary British fiction

Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing: Realism, Feminism, Materialism

BY EMILIE WALEZAK

Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

ISBN: 9781350171350

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/rethinking-contemporary-british-womens-writing-9781350171350/

Providing close readings of well-known British realist writers including Pat Barker, A.S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Sarah Hall, Bernadine Evaristo, and Zadie Smith, this book uses new directions in material and posthuman feminism to examine how contemporary women writers explore the challenges we collectively face today. Walezak redresses negative assumptions about realism's alleged conservatism and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human meditations, local and global scales, and author and reader.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Considering how contemporary realist writing is attuned to pressing issues including globalization, climate change, and interconnectivity, this book provides innovative new ways of reading realism, examines how these writers are looking to reinvent the genre, and shows how realism helps reimagine our place in the world.

Emilie Walezak is professor of Contemporary English at the University of Nantes, France. A specialist of contemporary British women writing, she has devoted several articles to the works of Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Sarah Hall, Rose Tremain and Jeanette Winterson. She is the author of Rose Tremain. A Critical Introduction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Book News: Contemporary women writers and artists and their uniquely feminine ethics of desire

The Aesthetic Clinic: Feminine Sublimation in Contemporary Writing, Psychoanalysis, and Art

BY FERNANDA NEGRETE

State University of New York Press, September 2020

Hardcover: 978-1-4384-8021-3, $95

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6962-the-aesthetic-clinic.aspx

The Aesthetic Clinic examines experimental art and literature by women alongside psychoanalysis and philosophy to develop a new understanding of sublimation and aesthetic experience.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do not constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

In The Aesthetic Clinic, Fernanda Negrete brings together contemporary women writers and artists well known for their formal experimentation—Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Roni Horn, and Clarice Lispector—to argue that the aesthetic experiences afforded by their work are underwritten by a tenacious and uniquely feminine ethics of desire. To elaborate this ethics, Negrete looks to notions of sublimation and feminine sexuality developed by Freud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, and their reinvention with and after Jacques Lacan, including in the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But she also highlights how psychoanalytic theory draws on writing and other creative practices to conceive of unconscious processes and the transformation sought through analysis. Thus, the “aesthetic clinic” of the book’s title (a term Negrete adopts from Deleuze) is not an applied psychoanalysis or schizoanalysis. Rather, The Aesthetic Clinic privileges the call and constraints issued by each woman’s individual work. Engaging an artwork here is less about retrieving a hidden meaning through interpretation than about receiving a precise transmission of sensation, a jouissance irreducible to meaning. Not only do art and literature serve an urgent clinical function in Negrete’s reading but sublimation itself requires an embrace of femininity.

“Intellectually ambitious, original, cross-disciplinary, and coherently argued, there is much to admire in this book.” 

— Margaret Iversen, author of Photography, Trace, and Trauma

At the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Fernanda Negrete is assistant professor of French and executive director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture.